How can we have an intelligent public when they are, even in this fairly randomly selected, largely factual article, drip-fed lies. The people who do this are not stupid. They are well educated and knowingly misguiding people for their own ends.

QUOTE:

“BREXIT may still not happen and Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are “destroyers led by vanity”, the European Union’s (EU) foreign affairs chief warned.”

LIE:

Brok is not the EU’s foreign affairs chief. He is the chair of the EP’s committee on Foreign Affairs. Nobody would ever call the chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee the UK’s foreign affair’s chief. Brok is well known for being outspoken (he once shouted at me and my boss), so they inflate his position to make us think that this is the EU’s official position rather than one fairly influential MEP’s views.

QUOTE:

“Elmar Brok said the June 23 vote was just an “advisory referendum” and the British Government is not bound to act upon it.”

MISLEADING:

This is a fact, but it is portrayed as just being an opinion of Brok. This is the type of deliberate diminishing of the concept of facts and replacing regard for them with appeals to emotions

“The German MEP, who helped set up the EU’s constitution, hit out at the two Brexit campaign figureheads, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson for quitting so soon after the result.”

The EU does not have a Constitution, it has a Treaty. They are not the same thing. Constitution sounds scary and like a super-state, which is why they used this term instead of the correct one. The treat was agreed by all Member States, including the UK. As it happens, there was proposed EU constitution, but referenda in several Member States led to it never coming into force. Also, it wouldn’t have actually been a constitution, but a treaty that looked a bit like a constitution in some ways. Brok was very much involved in the drafting the rejected proposal, but this is not particularly relevant as it doesn’t exist.

This constant drip feed of misleading or untrue information, but not to such an extent that they get in trouble for it is done to make untruths commonplace in thought and conversation, thus cementing them until they become orthodoxies in people’s minds that cannot be challenged by the fact that something is, well, a demonstrable fact.